Settlement and Community: Their Location, Limits, and Movement through the Landscape of Historical Cyprus

Settlement is an inevitability of human presence in a landscape; a collection of
houses indicates settlement, but so too does a field system - the farmers must live
somewhere. Wherever there are people there will be settlement, from large
concrete and glass urban centres to the tented impermanence of a nomads' camp.
Settlement is a result of the human presence, but remains a sterile idea without
some discussion of community. Certainly settlement can be studied without
community, but it remains an abstract assembly of parts unless the people that
constructed or occupied it are taken into account. A single settlement is home to
numerous communities that continuously form, divide and reform in response to
the changing practical and social situations that everyday life presents.
Before any settlement is established a series of decisions has to be made with due
consideration of an area's topography and natural resources, as well as existing
settlements in the landscape and any established social, economic or political
systems. Physical considerations such as a settlement's location and extent, or the
definition of its boundaries, can be viewed individually, but are more usefully
considered in conjunction with one another so that a settlement is treated as a
working unit that is part of a wider system, rather than an abstract collection of
components.

This thesis approaches questions of settlement and community in historic Cyprus
- from the Late Roman period to the end of the Ottoman period - through a
presentation of the experience and results of fieldwork I carried out in 2003. The
fieldwork comprised a survey project specifically conceived, planned and
executed by myself for my PhD research. It focused on three discrete areas of
Cyprus: Akrotiri, a low-lying area of salt marsh, batha and citrus groves in the
south of the island; an area of agriculture and coastal maquis on the west coast,
north of Peyia; and the Nikitari village territory, which stretches from the
southern margins of the Mesaoria up into the lower reaches of the Troodos
mountains. The topographical cross section evident in my chosen areas gave me
the opportunity to study the diversity of settlement across most of the range of
habitats of the island, from the coast, through plains, scrub and foot hills, to all
but the highest reaches of the Troodos mountains.
My experiences in the landscape undoubtedly influenced my observation,
recording and interpretation of material evidence in the field, and are a vital, if
elusive element of my data. I have exploited their influence to make my
presentation the landscape I perceived coherent and vivid. Whilst they could not
give me a complete understanding of the experiences of the erstwhile occupants
of the settlements I have studied, my own experiences do lead me toward it
through an appreciation of the landscape and the considerations necessary for
anyone living, working or travelling in it.
Through my data I examine the location of settlements in the landscape and their
changing distribution over time, before endeavouring to identify evidence for
community amongst the physical remains in the landscape.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.